Topic: iPhone 4S

The European Commission announced on Tuesday that it has opened a formal investigation to decide whether Samsung's use of standard-essential FRAND patents as leverage in high profile cases, such as the company's worldwide battle with Apple, violates EU antitrust laws.

China's third-largest wireless carrier confirmed on Monday the imminent launch of the iPhone 4S on its network and suggested that it could begin selling the device as early as the end of February or the beginning of March.

International smartphone vendors, including Samsung, HTC, Nokia and LG, are rumored to be waiting until the second quarter to release new handset models in order to avoid direct competition with Apple's hot-selling iPhone 4S.

Faced with an influx of grey marketers and incidents of repeated violence over sales of the iPhone 4S in Hong Kong, Apple has turned to a safer, more secure system for divvying out new stock of the handset to customers each day.

Investment bank Morgan Stanley believes Apple will partner up with both China Telecom and China Mobile "over the next year" to make its iPhone available on all three Chinese carriers, a move that could bring incremental sales of as many as 40 million units next calendar year.

Even as Apple appears to have retaken the top spot among smartphone makers during the fourth quarter of 2011, a new analysis claims the iPhone made up 8.3 percent of the worldwide mobile phone market during the same period.

Apple overtook Samsung in the fourth quarter of 2011 to grab the top spot among global smartphone makers, earning 23.9 percent of the market with sales of 37 million iPhones, according to one set of estimates.

Despite the customary price drop of Apple's last generation iPhone 4 and the free-on-contract iPhone 3GS, the company's newest handset dominated sales and has seen strong numbers not only from early adopters, but "conventional" smartphone users as well.

Apple CEO Tim Cook outlined his thoughts on the company's iOS device performance during Q1 2012 and sees iPhone sales momentum closing the gap with rival handsets running Google's Android platform, while iPad and iPod touch are in a league of their own.

A new survey of recent iPhone customers found that 21 percent of iPhone 4S buyers chose Apple's highest capacity 64-gigabyte model, while 36 percent of users migrated from another platform like Android, BlackBerry or Palm.

Samsung has instituted a temporary sale for its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Canada to boost sales while Singapore carrier M1 is now officially carrying camera-less iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S models following a premature launch earlier in January.

One of the final obstacles to the arrival of Apple's iPhone on the China Telecom network has been removed with the news that a Chinese regulatory agency has granted a network access license for the handset.

Apple passed Samsung as the world's largest buyer of miniscule MEMS microphones in 2011, while a European Union judgment on Google's proposed buyout of Motorola Mobility is set to take place in February.